Communication, curiosity, and personal style
When people talk, especially via the Internet, I expect misunderstandings, since human language is so fraught with ambiguity. And though I work very hard at clarity, I know my skill is limited and I sometimes fail.
So I see communication as an iterative process: I say something that you don’t quite get, and you say “Huh?” about the what or why or how of some particular part, and I refine my message. Likewise, I listen to you, and check out the places were I’m puzzled.
I’m very sensitive where I think I’m seeing criticisms/dismissals without inquiry/curiosity, and hence some peevishness in some remarks (now edited) in my previous post, Why program with continuous time?. See Fostering creativity by relinquishing the obvious for related remarks.
In some venues, like reddit, aggressive non-inquiry can become the dominant mode of discussion. Because I prefer high-quality, open-minded inquiry, I mostly choose moderated blogging instead. If I don’t pass a comment through, I’ll usually offer the writer some suggestions, perhaps suggesting a possible misreading of whatever was being responded to, and invite re-submission. If I’m particularly annoyed with the writer, I’ll usually take time to get over my annoyance before responding, so there can be a delay.
In this way, I try to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio, where noise includes assumptions, reactions to misreadings, and often compounded public attempts by people to get each other to listen more carefully.
I’m starting to discover that people I don’t get along with sometimes have a very different style from mine. I like to invite many possibilities into a space and explore them. My mother shared with me a quote from Henry Nelson Wieman, which she now uses as her email signature:
To get the viewpoint of the other person appreciatively and profoundly and reconcile it with his own so far as possible is the supreme achievement of man and his highest vocation.
While I’m agnostic about the “supreme/highest” part (and open to it), I very much like Wieman’s description of individual and collective learning as progressing most powerfully by integrating different viewpoints, as founded on working to understanding each other “appreciatively and profoundly”.
I’m learning that some other folks have an oppositional style of learning and discovering.
When Thomas (Bob) Davie and I worked together in Antwerp, he told me that his style is to fiercely resist (battle) any new idea proposed to him. Whatever breaks through his defenses is worth his learning. I was flabbergasted at the distance between his style and mine. And greatly relieved also, because I had to work with him, and I had previously interpreted his behavior as non-curious and even anti-creative. Although I wasn’t willing to collaborate in the battle mode at the time, fortunately he was willing to try shifting his style. And the recognition of our differing style toward similar ends helped greatly in relieving the building tension between us. Now I enjoy him very much.
Since this surprising discovery, I’ve wondered how often friction I have with other people coincides with this particular difference in personal styles and whether there are additional style that I hadn’t been aware of. So when friction arises, I now try to find out, via a private chat or email.
Edits:
- 2010-01-04: Filled in Bob’s name (with permission).
Steven Fodstad:
I’m afraid your method isn’t a good way of achieving your goal. No expression is perfect, and misreadings and inapplicable assumptions that occur to reader A will likely occur to reader B as well. Revealing the explanation reader A required is an easy way to disabuse reader B of the same misapprehensions. And few readers will take the time to comment, even if they take the time to read all the comments. Taking the error correction out-of-band (to email) means those who don’t receive the side-band (not privy to the email) will have uncorrected errors. I suppose you could summarize your discussions in an update to your blog post or with another blog post, but this would decrease the S/N ratio of the main blog stream, IMHO. Also, edits break the syndication model (readers expect updates to create new posts, but edits do not. More importantly, readers expect posts to remain unchanging and won’t attempt to read them twice).
The ideal method, IMHO, is unmoderated comments where any time that a person apprehends correctly and makes a substantive comment, your reply to that comment becomes a blog post instead of a comment. This keep the important part, the blog stream, substantive, while minimizing the time and effort barriers to communication.
4 January 2010, 3:06 amclh:
Curiosity is a good thing, but it usually comes with a timeout heuristic. When the value of an avenue of investigation appears to be less than the value of the lost opportunity to spend that time on other avenues of investigation or action, most people will move on. For people who work in operations rather than research, the many demands on their time requires them to rapidly discard suggestions that don’t carry immediately obvious benefits.
Some people are breadth-first searchers. It’s annoying, but the only time I would get upset about it is when someone is failing to show curiosity proportional to the magnitude of the non-reversible action they are performing on me.
4 January 2010, 3:54 amAngela Harms:
I love curiosity too (as you know, Conal). It’s not just that it’s rich and fun and juicy, though. It–mine and that of other people–helps me learn and create knowledge generally.
I an imagine that being bombarded by stupid ideas could get old, and I might adopt an antagonistic approach to discussion as a defense against something so un-fun. But maybe a more satisfying approach would be to surround myself with people who bring beautiful ideas, and then to explore them with curiosity? Then the defense isn’t needed.
As an aside, while I appreciate your desire to keep discussion on-topic, I almost never want to comment on your blog, because of icky feelings that come up in me around your moderation. While I love hashing things out with you, for you to ask me to not have said what I’ve already said makes me feel like puking.
4 January 2010, 7:22 amKenn Knowles:
I like this post very much.
“When people talk, especially via the Internet, I expect misunderstandings, since human language is so fraught with ambiguity.” – As you’ve mentioned elsewhere (reddit?) removing the ambiguity is extremely hard, and is more-or-less what we do when we make software or mechanically verifiable proofs. So I try to view even very precise statements like software: If you find a bug (or just unexpected behavior) in video player you’ve downloaded, do you dismiss it and insult its author or do you report the bug? I thought of this description via your words “I say something that you don’t quite get, and you say ‘Huh?’ about the what or why or how some particular part, and I refine my message.”
Especially in research where we compete for publication, it is easy to begrudge others’ success and become combative towards their ideas. The paper-reviewing process has taught me a lot about how much easier it is to find minor faults with words (formalisms, programs) and write a bad review than to understand the merit of the viewpoint behind them and write a good review trying to aid the authors by adding your perspective to what they have shared.
4 January 2010, 9:08 amAngela Harms:
Wow. I love what Steven had to say here. Rather than seeing a comment stream that’s all clean and neat, I’d love to see one full of error & sweat & even pain. Held up to the light of community, those rich things can move, shifting toward something we can bite into. Kept behind the scenes, I think, they’re slowed down; creativity & sparkle suffer.
4 January 2010, 11:10 amconal:
Steven & Angela. Thanks for focusing on some benefits of letting reader comments through, unmanaged.
I’d like to respond to your comments, and I’m focused on some other writing right now, which brings up a familiar dilemma for me. This dilemma is at the heart of this post, so I’ll ask my readers (including you two) for help.
Please reread & reconsider my post (and, where applicable, our past conversations), and consider what properties I am seeking to nurture in this space that would not be supported well by your suggestions and how these properties are hindered by your suggestion. Then lay out these properties here and help to brainstorm. In other words, help with Wieman’s recommendation “To get the viewpoint of the other person appreciatively and profoundly and reconcile it with your own so far as possible”.
If I can consistently get this kind of help from readers, I will be much more interested in keeping an unmoderated blog.
4 January 2010, 11:32 amconal:
BTW, I really don’t like moderating, because I like flow and ease. (Here, particularly flow for us all and ease for me.)
4 January 2010, 12:22 pmKeith Yip:
Perhaps this is a reason (or an excuse?) why I prefer face-to-face rather than online communication such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. We get more information from interpreting the speaker’s body language and tone of voice, and we have immediate opportunity to clarify our misunderstandings. The flip side, however, is that I tend to react more intensely from non-verbal communication, and when the speaker whom we have misunderstandings with is right in front of us, we might respond with a more “confrontational” style.
This is also one thing I have problem with myself. During my psychotherapy sessions, my therapist was able to adapt into my feelings, validate the kernel of truth within my thoughts, and paraphrase them in his own perspective – even at moments when my mind was filled with contradictions and distortions from reality. I’m quite frustrated of myself: How can one develop such agility of mind – even when confronted with things in life that one doesn’t like?
8 April 2010, 1:03 pm